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Heloise Williams makes dance-pop music. Dance-pop is not usually associated with depth, unless you’re talking about the deep tones of the bass and drums that drive it.

As much as Williams sought out that sound following her stint as the vocalist for the legendary Vermont-based jazz-funk band viperHouse, she started feeling that lack of depth. “Playing pop is certainly not an older person’s game,” said Williams, who joined viperHouse while attending Middlebury College in the mid-1990s. “I certainly wanted to feel I was doing something for the greater good of society rather than adding more garbage to the world.”

Yet dance-pop music is what she does in her group Heloise and the Savoir Faire. So she found a way to blend the skimming-the-surface nature of that genre with lyrical depth. The group’s new album, “Diamond Dust,” has an overarching theme, according to Williams: “Why are stories told over and over again? What is it about human nature that needs a story or narrative?” She’ll sing songs from that album Friday at a show at the new Satellite Arts gallery on Pine Street.

“Content-wise I was really inspired by myth,” Williams said of the album that includes songs inspired by Prometheus (“Vibezz”) and the famous villain from “Beowulf” (“Grendel’s Mother”). “It’s weirdly about death, too, and confronting mortality and the idea of that, with myth being a record of human lives. It’s definitely an element of confronting your own mortality or leaving something of real depth — ‘Why are we here, what is my purpose in life?’ These giant, huge, amorphous questions were definitely on my mind.”

Recorded in Vermont and New York City, “Diamond Dust” embraces modern dance music with a heavy dose of Auto-tuned vocals but also dips into ’80s synth-pop and slick soul. It’s new and it’s nostalgic.

It’s been five years since the Savoir Faire’s debut album, “Trash, Rats and Microphones,” came out on actor Elijah Wood’s label Simian Records. That delay had a lot to do with Williams’ self-described “crisis about music.”

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Williams, who splits her time between Burlington and Brooklyn with husband/musical partner James Bellizia, became so disenchanted with the music world that she started studying pre-med at the University of Vermont with eyes on a career change. She found herself in the College of Medicine’s MindBodyMedicine clinic studying the effects of music on the brain.

Williams was intrigued by the idea of science attempting to quantify music, but also knew that was not her forte. She realized she is a singer, and that’s what she’s meant to do, just with more substance than what she had been doing.

“Dance music, it’s meant to make people feel good,” Williams said in a phone conversation last week. “I definitely wanted it to have a bit more gravitas and more depth.”

The question is, though, do people notice that gravitas when they’re really just trying to have fun on the dance floor? Williams thinks so.

“I think people can tell when a song is kind of, like, deeper, and whether or not they’re really ingesting the lyrics. In a literal sense they can kind of feel it,” she said. “I feel very aligned with what I’m singing and what I’m doing, and I feel like when I’m doing that people can tell.”

Williams’ shows since the album came out in March have been much more streamlined than, say, the gig on Church Street during last year’s Burlington Discover Jazz Festival when she and a half-dozen musicians cavorted on stage with big-headed dancers resembling mutant Little Orphan Annies. “I wanted that art and I like the artifice,” she said. “It’s fun, the spectacle — ‘What is this?’”

The aggressive flamboyance the Savoir Faire is known for has been toned down in favor of Williams singing and Bellizia playing guitar, bass and percussion. She acknowledges she was hiding to a degree behind the musicians, dancers, costumes and makeup.

“It’s always been a huge fear of mine to be so stripped down,” Williams said. “It is scary to be just me.”

She might go back to the on-stage spectacle at some point, but she’s sticking with the simpler approach for the moment. “Right now I need to connect with the music and the singing,” she said.

That new style has helped Williams get over her identity crisis and arrive in a good place. “Your sense of purpose is so clear when you’re performing. It felt really life-affirming,” she said. “I do definitely feel like this is my choice and music is what I will be doing for the foreseeable future.”